Apr 8, 2016

All pics below are taken by John Beasley (www.johnbeasley.ie – please respect the images folks and contact him if you'd like to use them elsewhere).

Hi Paul and Gloria,

First up, your care package of T-Shirts and art
is en-route – give me a shout when it lands so I know it got there are
didn't somehow get "lost" by the Irish or US postal service. This has
happened before! There's another to come too...

We're just
back from a week down in the south west of Ireland in west County Cork -
our farewell trip to Ireland before relocating to Australia. West Cork
has some pretty incredible scenery and as luck would have it, some great
waves. I was to meet up with a mate to drop off some artwork to and to
share some sliders. When I got there however, he was staggering up the
beach with his mat, a 4GF UDT, under his arm – latent back injury
truncated his session short. There doesn't seem to be too many matters
on the Island of Ireland and though we're only six-hours apart it had
taken 12 months for us to finally get together for a session... ah well.
He went up and got his camera gear and fired off a few snaps of me
riding for the two of us.

I've been riding the Standard you
shaped for me quite a bit of late and simply having a ball on it – I'm
bewildered by the differences between mats. My wife won't let me ride the
Fatty you built for her and so I'm frothing to try out the Omni that
has already landed in Australia awaiting our arrival.
Farewell to Ireland for now – the past three years
of empty or sparsely patronized line-up at long points, hairy reefs,
gurgling slabs and fun beachies has scarred me for life. We'll be back
at some stage in the future but for now, the new horizons of Australia,
first Queensland and eventually Tasmania, are only a week away.

I really doubt you remember but I got a mat
off you a few years back. Unfortunately, I've been pretty much outta the
water so its never gotten the water time it deserved but I did come
across another of your mats in the wild the other day over here in the
very SW of Ireland (down where they're filming the next star wars
movie!) and I snapped a couple of picks I thought you might be stoked
on.

It was a pity John and I didn't get to share
a few together - always fun seeing some photos of yourself riding. I'm
not sure it's possible to look like a kook on a mat but I'm loving the
feeling of being that stoked grommet again every time I take it out!

I
originally came to Ireland for my sister's wedding in 2005. It was only
supposed to be a two week trip but work fell though just before I was
due to leave. I had a week to organise a one-year work visa and
landed with about four hundred Aussie dollars. Before leaving
Australia I had no idea there were waves to be found and, as it turned
out, I've since had the best waves of my life here. I ended up in the
north west in County Sligo. The north west has so many incredible
setups, some easy to find but so many more that are rarely surfed. It
really pushed my surfing. Total immersion is the best way to experience
it but that means installing yourself. Winter can be hard. A mate today
said that this last winter was the worst he'd had in ten years. Yes,
cold. But the wet... And the wind, sleet, hail, storm after storm. So
much rain! But the waves.

I've left about four
times now and I keep finding myself back out here. I had my final
session this morning. It's Spring now and I had borrowed a mate's
wetsuit, a 3mm...to put under my 5mm. I thought I might have hardened up
to the cold by now. I admit that I've been cheating a bit the last two
or so years, since getting on the mats pretty much full-time, by wearing
my dive suit. A two piece 7mm - 14mm around the vitals has been a game
changer for the cold. I might look like a looper but I'm a UFO anyway
riding the mats here.

The decision to head back
to Oz however, has been a tricky one. My wife is from here and the
parents on both sides aren't getting any younger; we've a little fellah
now too. We're not making it easy on ourselves or them. Ah, on the
flipside we've no mortgage, no big assets to worry about, no credit
cards to pay off... There are advantages, disadvantages and compromises.
Muireann's visa for Australia came though in March. It was tough and
epensive to get so we had to lay things out and make a decision. Off we
go.

Though we moved around a bit, I guess I'd call
the Sunshine Coast in Queensland home. About 40 mins south of Noosa. I
learned to surf on the Sunny Coast beaches and points. My brother only
recently told me about a good swell that oushed in and out local point
was firing and about 150 guys out. I just can't fathom those sort of
numbers anymore. When my local in Sligo is firing there could be 20 guys
out and that is considered ridiculously crowded. That said, the break
adjacent to it could be flawless and empty or with one other guy out
there. I'm a little nervous about heading back to the frenetic hustle of
the frothers back home. Home? In the past ten years I've spent almost a
year back "home". It's going to be weird.

So Tassie?
I spent four years down there after returning from the first stays
in Ireland. I did a marine science degree down there. The island of
Tasmania is roughly the same size as the Republic of Ireland; population
about five hundred thousand and around a third of the State is
wilderness. There could still be dinosaurs in the southwest -
predominantly untracked, wild country. When I first got there something
about it reminded me about Ireland. Couldn't put my finger on it, might
not. Empty beaches, rugged coastlines, the mountains, the weirdos...

It's
the marine science that has pulled me back down there this time. I
looking down the barrel of a PhD. Tassie is at the bottom of the map and
there's nothing much south until you hit Antarctica as such it's a
prime spot to study climate change. I'm going to be looking at how well
habitat-forming seaweed are going to cope with the rising sea
temperatures and acidification. The reseach should help us understand
how these ecosystems are going to respond to the predicted changes and
how these areas might be managed and cared for. It's going to be
challenging work.

Time off down there will
certainly be spent exploring the coastline. Similar to Ireland there's a
rugged coastline to explore and not too many folks. There's a few spots
in particular down there that I have unfinished business with. Some of
them fickle enough so being installed for for a few years will
offer ample opportunity to revisit a few haunts and explore others. I'd
like to find some, crikey, at least one, other inflatable enthusiasts
down there to share some sessions and go exploring with. Ah, I'll take
it as it comes.

You'll have another head to
visit if you find yourself down there. I'll do my best to keep the odd
report sent out from the wilderness.

Ian is such a lovely dude and it's infectious just even
talking to him about mats! I'm in the middle of prepping for a wedding
tomorrow, but I will have another look through the images and see if I
have any more you might be stoked on.

I
actually have a friend interested in getting a mat for himself after
seeing the pics of Ian, I think it opened his mind a little. He's tried
mine a few times but never "got it" but he's gotten the sniff of it and
is looking for more :)

Could you
recommend which model would be the right one for him? He's about 5'10
maybe 90kg ish, a fit bloke and a handy enough surfer. He was thinking
of the fatty as he hopes to use it with his two young girls come the
summer months?

Apr 7, 2016

A new era for living in space may be about to start. A prototype habitat is headed to the International Space Station
for a two-year trial. What makes the module unique is it's launched
folded up, and it's inflated to its full size once in orbit.

The idea for inflatables began at NASA's Johnson Space Center in the 1990s. The space agency was trying to figure out how to get
astronauts to Mars, without the crew going crazy living in a tiny
capsule for months on end.

Kriss Kennedy was a NASA engineer
working on the problem. It essentially boiled down to this: How do you
pack a large living structure into a small rocket cargo space? The
solution: inflatables.
"Well, there are several advantages for
inflatable habitats; one is you can package it in a smaller volume,"
says Kennedy, and then expand it once you get into space.

The
inflatable is not like a balloon. Folded up, it just looks like a
cylinder. Expanded, it grows upward and outward so it looks more like a
watermelon.

It's made of multiple layers of Kevlar and other materials
resistant to micrometeorites. And even though it's inflated, Kennedy
says you shouldn't think of it as squishy.

"It's very rigid," he says. "Once you get even a partial pressure it's extremely hard, as hard as aluminum."

But
as enthusiastic as some at NASA were for this new approach to building
space habitats, Congress wasn't sufficiently impressed, and in 2000
legislators told NASA to kill the program. Enter billionaire Robert Bigelow, a man who made his fortune in budget hotels. He saw a future for inflatable space habitats, maybe even space hotels.

He got the rights to NASA's inflatable technology and created Bigelow Aerospace. After more than a decade of development, the company has produced BEAM, Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, and NASA has agreed to attach it to the International Space Station and see how it performs.

Folded up, BEAM is about 6 feet by 6 feet. Inflated, it's about 12 feet by 10 feet, approximately the size of a small RV.

NASA wanted extra room that could be transported to space in compact form and expanded upon arrival.

Jason Crusan
is in charge of BEAM for NASA. He says when it arrives at the station,
astronauts will remove it from the cargo rocket with the station's
robotic arm and plug into a node on the station.
Once it's securely attached, the astronauts will start to inflate it.

"It
could be done as fast as four minutes," says Crusan. "We're not going
to do it that fast. We'll do it over the course of several hours."

It's
not that expanding it too fast might make it pop. BEAM's layered design
won't let that happen. He says you could poke a big hole in an outer
layer "and it will leak, obviously. But it's not going to puncture like a
balloon."

While it's attached to the space station, the plan
is for the crew to go inside the habitat from time to time to see how
it's performing. Crusan says there are no plans at the moment for the
crew to have a sleepover.

BEAM will be attached to the space
station for two years. After that it will be detached and allowed to
burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Crusan says NASA now sees a future for inflatables, and it's the same future as in the 1990s: getting humans to Mars.

"We do want to look at the use of expandables in what we call our Mars transit architecture," he says.
What goes around comes around.

Apr 6, 2016

True personal story I wanted to share with you as it has been a really uplifting experience. I had an old friend show up who went down the wrong road and
went through alot but has managed to beat the demons and keep to the
straight and narrow path.

Well
into clean living, he would go down and watch me surf.We surfed
together as kids. I got him on the Vespa and he was blown away. Had
tears in his eyes exclaiming I'm like a little kid!! He catches waves
finless, gave him some UDT's but he still paddles in and rides waves the
hard way anytime there's surf.He's in really good shape.

Being good and doing the right thing,going to church,the gym can be
hard work and a bit boring compared to the alternative.Mat surfing has
been a huge release for my friend.And a hell of alot of fun!! Now if I could only get him to put the damn fins on!!

Apr 1, 2016

As I was down
surfing at El Capitan the other day, trying to hide from this wind, and
there was a guy out on a new’ish ‘Omni’ I think he said it was...? I was
pretty sure you might know him, so I thought I’d send along the photos
for your amusement, and to pass on to the guy if you know his email
addie. Who doesn’t like to get photos of themselves surfing over the
email...? They’re nothing special, but that next-to-last one is pretty classic,
and shows a nice moment.